Abstract
Focusing on recent women`s solo performances on transnational adoption, this paper examines the ways in which the female body in performance challenges as well as reproduces prevalent narratives around adoption such as fantasies of identity and origin. In N/A (2012) by Katie Leo and Motherlanded (2016) by Julia Gay, the performer`s body becomes a source of knowledge and a site of frustration, through which she discovers and reimagines her ties to her mother/land. Leo`s investigation into her blood/muscle memory and Gay`s (un)doing of gendered and ethnicized spectacles highlight each performer`s inseparable connection to places of origin. Such associations, however, are disrupted by ambivalent (if not troubling) moments of dis-identification when the body reaches the impasse of understanding and reconciliation beyond the bodily imagination. By exploring how a gendered and ethnicized body reconstructs personal and national histories in the embodied space of theater, this study further considers the contingencies of transforming personal narratives into public discourses.
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